The Lincoln Minute Man Dispatch:  December 2002

Book Review:
James Madison
by Garry Wills
(Times Books, 2002) 185 pgs
Submitted by Donald L. Hafner

If George Washington is the father of our country, James Madison is the father of our Constitution. He was an unlikely soldier in the Revolution. Barely five-foot-four and a hundred pounds, he became a colonel in the Orange County militia in Virginia only because his father was a Virginia squire of substantial property. Madison served for just one year before being elected, at age 25, to Virginia’s revolutionary convention. He seems, by all accounts, to have been quite the revolutionary firebrand in 1775 — and a bit stiff-necked. He failed to get re-elected to the convention because “he disdained the election practice of providing drinks and jollity at the polls.” Madison finished out the War as an appointee in Governor Patrick Henry’s Council.

In 1786, the Continental Congress agreed to call a special meeting in Philadelphia to consider amendments to the Articles of Confederation. With Hamilton and others, Madison maneuvered to transform this into a true constitutional convention. He persuaded Washington to attend the convention and give it stature. As a delegate from Virginia, Madison drafted “The Virginia Plan” presented by Edmund Randolph, which essentially ignored the Articles of Confederation and shifted all debate to the form that a new, federal government should take. When the Constitution was ready for ratification, Madison joined with Hamilton and John Jay in writing The Federalist Papers, which answered the Constitution’s critics and allow us even today to hear the voices of the Founders. Madison was a member of the first Congress when he proposed nineteen amendments to the new Constitution, ten of which were adopted as The Bill of Rights.

Madison became Secretary of State under Jefferson in 1801, and in 1809, he began the first of his own two terms as President. He then almost destroyed what he had created. He provoked a ruinous conflict with Great Britain, pushed New England to the brink of secession from the Union, and botched the military defense of the country so badly that he barely escaped with his own neck when British troops advanced on Washington, DC, and torched the White House. With good reason, Garry Wills devotes this gem of a book to a great puzzle about Madison — “how to put together the shrewd constitutionalist and the hapless commander-in-chief”?

The War of 1812, we were told as school children, was about Britain’s practice of seizing American sailors on the high seas. As Wills tells the story, it was more about Madison’s stubborn refusal to recognize facts. Britain was engaged in war against Napoleon’s France, and to staff its navy, Britain needed every able-bodied recruit it could find. British sailors understandably preferred the higher pay and looser discipline of merchant ships. So they deserted to American ships, and the British navy halted and searched ships in order to retrieve its deserters. Given the difficulties of distinguishing which sailors were British and which American, occasionally the British Navy seized Americans as well. The United States could have stopped all this by banning British sailors from its ships. But American shipping could not survive without British sailors. So Madison persuaded himself that a ban on all American trade with Britain would be so painful to the British that they would prefer to risk defeat by Napoleon rather than continue offending the United States. Since Britain was itself blockading major European ports, Madison’s policy threatened to strangle all American trade overseas. When the American embargo failed to budge the British, Madison secured a declaration of war in the House by a vote of 78 to 45, and in the Senate by a bare 18 to 13. Both votes there thoroughly partisan, with not a single member of the opposition Federalist party voting for war.

Madison’s first objective in the war was Canada. He calculated that if the United States could conquer Canada, it could cut off yet another source of trade for Britain. Why Madison selected the military commanders that he did is part of Wills’s great puzzle. For an invasion to be mounted from Detroit, the President chose William Hull (an aging veteran of the Revolution, reduced to incoherence by a stroke) and William Henry Harrison (who had claimed “victory” at Tippecanoe to cover up his own incompetence when the Indians who had ambushed him ran out of ammunition and withdrew). For an invasion mounted from New York, Madison chose Henry Dearborn, who dithered about, insulted and alienated his own soldiers, and had to abandon the invasion just as it began when his troops fell into confusion and fired on each other. What deepens the puzzle is why, two years later, the disorder in the army was still so great that Madison himself (aged 63) rode out to Bladensburg, Maryland, to oversee the defenses against the British army that was advancing on the nation’s capital. The American defenders outnumbered the British attackers by two-to-one, yet within minutes of engagement, the American forces — and the President — were in headlong retreat. If Madison had not overruled his generals and ordered sailors and their cannon from a nearby navy yard to block the British path, the American forces might not have escaped. As it was, the British advanced at their leisure, encamped outside Washington, and selectively burned all the government buildings.

As the war against Napoleon in Europe wound down in 1814, Madison faced the prospect that the full weight of the British army and navy would now be turned on the United States. American and British peace negotiators met in the Belgian city of Ghent, and the British diplomats opened by demanding complete capitulation by the United States on all points. The Duke of Wellington was asked by the British government to take command of the war, but he declined, warning that subduing America would be far too costly. So the British diplomats soon settled for a peace treaty that restored matters to where they stood when the United States had declared war. As Wills’ notes, “the Ghent treaty was received with such relief that it was ratified by the Senate overnight.” The United States had gained not a single objective of “Mister Madison’s War.”

In probing the reasons for Madison’s abysmal record as a commander-in-chief, Wills is thorough, prudent, and fair-minded. The reasons that Wills finds have much to do with Madison’s distinctive personality and foibles, and much to do with the passions and inexperience of the adolescent country that he led. Garry Wills displays his skill as a historian by placing all this in its rich historical context. Yet it is impossible to read this tale without thinking of one or another of our modern presidents and of certain foreign policy ventures of our own times.

James Madison retired to his Montpelier estate in the Virginia hills, and there he died in 1836 at the age of 85, beset by illness and financial despair. He was a flawed man and a flawed President. Yet in this short biography, Garry Wills sketches a Founder worthy of our respect. If Madison embroiled the nation in a fruitless war, he also conducted the war without compromising the Constitution and the civil liberties it enshrines. How many modern presidents can claim as much? Wills is surely correct: “No man could do everything for the country — not even Washington. Madison did more than most, and did some things better than any. That is quite enough.”

The Lincoln Minute Man Dispatch:  November 2002

PLAY THE ONE WHERE WE SING ALONG — There was more to colonial military music than “Green Cockade.” An evening concert in Boston by a British regimental band in 1771 presented the following program. Act One offered Handel’s overture to Ptolemy, a song entitled “From the East Breaks the Morn,” a concerto by John Stanley, and a symphony by Bach. Act Two began with a duet entitled “Turn, Fair Clora,” and ended with an organ concerto and a symphony by Stanley. Act Three offered an overture by Carl Friedrich Abel, a duet from Handel entitled “When Phoebus the Tops of the Hills Doeth Adorn,” a violin solo, a new hunting song, and a symphony by Ricci. Quite an evening, heh?

The source of these facts is a Boston newspaper notice of the time, so the event undoubtedly occurred, as described. But surely the rank-and-file of fifes and drums did not produce such an event. I’m guessing the “band” was composed substantially of officers, who in the British army came principally from the aristocratic ranks where musical talent would have been cultivated as part of the proper education of a gentleman.

You may recall the gala event in Newport when Rochambeau arrived and Washington was present to greet him. When Washington was asked his favorite dance tune, and “Successful Campaign” was proposed, Rochambeau and his officers supposedly took up the instruments themselves and played the popular tune. Two-thirds of the French military officers of that era were from aristocratic families.

It ain’t all Yankee Doodle.

WEST CONCORD CONNECTIONS — Submitted by Mike Ryan, Historian.   On April 19, 1775, one of the two Framingham minute companies (Gleason’s) responding to the alarm included one Corporal Roger Brown. This unit fought from the Brook’s Tavern area to the Hartwell Tavern along the Battle Road in Lincoln. By 1775, Brown had purchased land and an old fulling mill in the West Concord area on the Assabet River. (Fulling increased the bulk of woolen cloth by subjecting it to repeated pounding by beaters powered by a waterwheel.) Brown also re structured an old house on the property, now called the Col. Roger Brown or the 1775 House in West Concord, aside the Damon Mill. In 1779, Brown married Mary “Polly” Hartwell, daughter of Ephraim and Elizabeth Hartwell of Lincoln.

Roger (who later became a Colonel in the local Light Infantry Brigade) and Polly had a son John, who became involved in the cloth mill operation (which, by the way, had been purchased by Polly’s brother Ephraim of New Hampshire and a cousin). John married the granddaughter of William Dawes, and they had a daughter, Helen Dawes Brown, who in 1878 became the second woman from Concord to graduate from college (Vassar).

The Roger Brown house still stands. The original cloth mill burned in the 1850s and was replaced by a brick reconstruction in the 1860s. Both are on Main Street (Route 62) in West Concord, directly across from the residence of your Historian. Little did your Historian suspect, as he gazed out his window, that he would uncover a connection between the Hartwell and Dawes families and the story of Ephraim/Elizabeth’s granddaughter.

The Lincoln Minute Man Dispatch:  August 2002

ANCIENT TRADITIONS EVEN THEN — Some colonial practices at the time of the Revolution, such as paying the Minute Men a penny for every mile they marched, seem quaint to us now, and they were ancient even back then. Consider the following provisions in The Body of Liberties, the laws that Massachusetts Bay Colony set for itself in 1641:

“5. No man shall be compelled to any public work or service unless the press be grounded upon some act of the general Court, and have reasonable allowance therefore.
“ 6. No man shall be pressed in person to any office, work, or wars or any other public service, who is necessarily and sufficiently exempted by all natural or personal impediment, as by want of years, greatness of age, defect of mind, failing of senses, or impotency of limbs.
“ 7. No man shall be compelled to go out of the limits of this plantation upon any offensive wars which this Commonwealth or any of our friends or confederates shall voluntarily undertake. But only upon such vindictive and defensive wars in our own behalf or the behalf of our friends and confederates as shall be enterprized by the counsel and consent of a Court general, or by authority derived from the same.”

Interesting phrase, “but only upon such vindictive wars.” Back then, just as now, vindictive meant vengeful. But today it also means spiteful and mean spirited, so waging a “vindictive war” would not merit praise. In colonial times, its other meaning was doing justice by punishing wrongs.